The art and science of classification: Phyllis Allen Richmond, 1921-1997

Library Trends, Spring, 2004 by Kathryn La Barre

The group met in open rooms at the national conferences of the American Documentation Institute (which later became the American Society for Information Science--ASIS, now ASIS&T), the American Library Association (ALA), and the Special Libraries Association (SLA). Richmond's recollections of the CRSG are of an informal organization "with no visible means of support" (Richmond, 1963c, p. 58). Cochrane tells of people crowded into meeting rooms, sometimes seated on the floor, freely discussing the problems they were encountering with the information systems they were either creating or wrestling with at their places of employment (Cochrane, 2001/2002, p. 27; La Barre, 2004). Those who remember these meetings all agree that these moments--stolen from the bustle of the national conferences of larger and more mainstream organizations--created a place for information workers in the academy, government, and business to talk about the problems that inevitably arise during the interaction of people, documents, and technology.

FACET ANALYSIS

   The future of generalized classification depends in large part
   upon man's ingenuity. So far there has been no limit in the
   capabilities of the human mind, and there seems, therefore, to
   be no justification for the view that classification as a way
   of organizing knowledge is dead merely because the philosophic
   approaches used so far have led to blind alleys. It is time to
   look for new approaches. (Richmond, 1963e, p. 401)

No doubt the discussions in the CRSG helped Richmond to formulate and to sharpen her understanding of the importance of facet analysis in the classification process and as the basis for new approaches to knowledge organization. Nevertheless her interest in facet analysis and faceted classification began as early as when she was a master's student at WRU. In her 1954 article, "Some Multi-Plane Classification Schemes," she discussed the havoc wrought upon Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) and the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) schemes by the growth of knowledge over time. Indicating an admiration for the work of Bliss and his creation of a classification "adaptable to anticipate changing needs in subject emphasis," she lauded those systems that are "especially designed to show relations among fields in order to provide some logical place" for new knowledge such as the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) and the Colon Classification, though she faults them for being "over-elaborate for most practical purposes." (Richmond, 1954, p. 61).

In an interesting conjecture, Richmond postulated that schemes like the DDC and LCC were prevented from adequate handling of composite subjects due to the fact that they work on two-dimensional planes. She proposed a creative series of poly-dimensional schemes designed to deal with poly-hierarchies and complex subjects. She illustrated how this might be done using, for example, Sarton's bibliographic classification scheme (used in the critical bibliographies published in ISIS from 1946 to 1952) or by graphically visualizing Aristotle's conception of the universe as a series of homocentric spheres with epistemology at the center (Richmond, 1954, p. 68). In her later work we see her demonstrating classification theory using three-dimensional visualizations (Williamson & Richmond, 1975). It is interesting to note the similarity between the illustrations for this 1975 article and current work such as the Visual Thesaurus (see http://www.visualthesaurus.com) and connectionist models with their nodes and links.